Meet The Female Entrepreneur Who Raised Over $3 Million From Crowdfunding, Not VCs

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Meet The Female Entrepreneur Who Raised Over $3 Million From Crowdfunding, Not VCs

Katherine Krug has raised over $1 million on Kickstarter. She’s the first solo female entrepreneur to do so.

Krug is the founder and CEO of BetterBack, a company that build devices, notably its namesake product designed to help with lower back pain. She took to Kickstarter to secure pre-orders after putting in $10,000 of her own cash into the development of the product. Launched in 2014, she’s now raised over $3 million through crowdfunding, and more than $1 million exclusively on Kickstarter. With no outside investments thus far, Krug argues that crowdfunding is an ideal platform for female entrepreneurs who’ve only been able to secure a small slice of investment dollars.

“Crowdfunding has democratized access to capital and removed all the gatekeepers. There is not a room full of men to pitch to,” she says. “The only people you have to pitch and satisfy are your future customers. This should make crowdfunding incredibly liberating for women and other underrepresented groups in entrepreneurship.”

Right now though there are a lot more men than women using crowdfunding to secure seed funding, however. According to research by PwC and The Crowdfunding Center, women are better at raising money through crowdfunding: Women are 32 percent more successful than men at hitting their fundraising goals and secure higher pledge amounts than their male counterparts.

I spoke with the founder of Eloqua, Mark Organ, who is now doing Influitive, for which, he has raised money not only from VCs, but also from a large group of angels on AngelList. He says, "I want a lot of smart people to help me." He has 44 shareholders in Influitive.

I think, equity crowdfunding will make this process a lot more scalable. You don't want to raise dumb money from the crowd necessarily if you can attract smart capital. But, what if you can attract smart, value-added investment from a crowd of people?